The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Samuel Clemens, 14 June 1887
Date: June 14, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: ucb.00961
Source: Walt Whitman Collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:101. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein, Kevin McMullen, and Stephanie Blalock
328 Mickle Street
Camden New Jersey1
June 14 '87
Dear S E C
I wish to send you my special deep-felt personal thanks for your kindness & generosity to me—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
(1835–1910), better know by his pen name, Mark Twain, was an American
humorist, novelist, lecturer, and publisher. Twain is best known for authoring
such novels as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Twain attended Whitman's
New York lecture on the death of Lincoln in April 1887. He also contributed to
Thomas Donaldson's fund for the purchase of a horse and buggy for Whitman (see Whitman's September 22, 1885, letter to Herbert Gilcrist), as well as to
the fund to build Whitman a private cottage (see Whitman's October 7, 1887, letter to Sylvester Baxter). Twain
was reported in the Boston Herald of May 24, 1887 to have
said: "What we want to do is to make the splendid old soul comfortable" (Clara
Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931],
268).
Notes:
1. This letter is addressed: Samuel E. Clemens | (Mark Twain) | Hartford | Conn:. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | Jun 14 | 10 AM | 87. [back]